The Drowned Girls (Angie Pallorino Book 1)

by Loreth Anne White

  “They say the Gorge is clean enough to swim in now,” O’Hagan said, watching him.

  “My ass,” said Leo. “Sewage is still pumped raw out to sea. How d’you know the currents and tide aren’t washing it all back into the Gorge? Like it probably washed this floater here in.”

  Maddocks came to his feet. He moved to the outer edge of the dock and visually scanned the surrounding area. The city lay behind him. The harbor with its marinas and float plane terminal stretched to his left, and the bridge and kayak club were situated at his right. Across the water apartments rose into the dense mist.

  “So, not only did you jump the homicide queue, I hear Buziak wants you as the lead on this,” Leo said, coming to stand beside him.

  “Didn’t know there was a queue,” Maddocks said, his gaze tracking up the bridge toward the massive counterweight in the sky.

  “At least six guys at the station champing at the bit to get that slot in homicide, all locals who know this city like the backs of their hairy ol’ hands. Plus a female detective in sex crimes who’s been rattling at the doors, like, forever.”

  Little did they know.

  This was not a career jump for him. It wasn’t even a lateral move. Logistically he should be moving up, managing things from behind a desk. He’d been pretty much Buziak’s equivalent back on the mainland. But he’d taken this job to be near Ginny. To make a break. To get away from the boyfriend issue with his wife, the messy divorce proceedings. To get down and dirty in the trenches. Maybe it was avoidance or plain self-distraction. Whatever, he needed this.

  Barb O’Hagan cut in. “Not that she stands a chance with all you union deadwood plugging up the place, sitting there at your desks, shaving pencils, solving your daily jumbles, drinking bad coffee, and scratching your fat butts, eh, Leo?”

  Leo snorted and tilted his head toward the squat little pathologist. “Crusty old morgue doc here can talk. When you up for retirement, anyway, Barb?”

  “And what would you do without me to solve your murders for you, Detective? I figure Pallorino would whip your fat asses if she got half a chance.”

  “Yeah, right. She’s not a team player, okay? She’s a … a misanthrope, a misandrist. It’s why you two get along so well, now, isn’t it? Barb?”

  “Big words, Leo, big words. You looked those up for your daily jumble this morning?”

  Maddocks mentally filed the tone of their banter. This pair was going to be interesting. Or trouble. He walked toward the bridge, looked up. It was maybe nine meters high on the west side, but more than twenty on the huge concrete counterweight side. “Who called it in?”

  “Homeless guy camping on the bank under the bridge,” Leo said. “He saw the floater, went berserkers, alerting the bridge operator who works way up in that box there.” He pointed. “Operator’s in charge of raising the bridge for marine traffic. We got his statement and one from the homeless wingnut. Got him in a vehicle up in the lot.”

  “Jumper, you think?”

  “Not a chance in hell. She’s trussed up like a sausage in plastic—wait till you see this one.”

  “Yo!” A sharp whistle issued from one of the officers on the vessels. “We got her! Diver’s bringing her up!”

  They all swung around to watch the boat with the dive team maneuver around the logs, the tender carefully reading his buddy’s line. A soft wet mist shrouded the water. The sleet doubled down as rain. Yet another vessel chugged along the marine channel under the bridge, sending a bigger surge and more waves slapping and chuckling under the dock. The logs rolled and bumped together.

  “Fucking idiots!” yelled Leo. “Where’s that backup harbor unit? Can’t they stop these damn things? Going to kill our diver down here.”

  The diver’s neoprene-covered head suddenly emerged outside of the boom in a smooth, mercurial swell of gray water, his goggles glistening. He brought a plastic-shrouded shape up beside him, and he started to swim it toward the dock. Maddocks, O’Hagan, and Leo went to the edge. Silence befell them. Their floater was still facedown. She surged and rolled in the swells, hair undulating with seaweed around her head. As the diver brought her closer, they could see two parallel striations—deep gashes—across the back of the victim’s skull, as if her head had been hacked open with an axe. From the neck down she was bound in what looked like a thick polyethylene tarp, opaque. Wound tight with rope. Another long piece of rope attached to her neck floated several meters out into the water.

  “You weren’t kidding when you said she’s been trussed up like a sausage,” Maddocks said quietly as he snapped on latex gloves. He crouched down at the edge of the dock as the diver brought her near. O’Hagan put on her own gloves, squatting down beside him. Leo stood slightly to the side, watching, his hands firmly in his pockets. A chill washed through Maddocks as he got a closer look at their floater.

  Under that plastic sheeting she was naked, her skin fish-belly white, like something alien. A grub.

  “Get that photographer down here,” Maddocks said to Leo, who in turn bellowed for the guy. The photographer, who’d been sheltering under cover of the bridge, came running along the dock, almost slipped, regained his balance.

  “Bloody rookies,” Leo mumbled, hands still tucked deep in his pockets. The photographer began to shoot images of the floater in the water. Two morgue guys came along the dock, carrying a metal litter basket and body bag.

  “Take a close-up of the back of her head here,” Maddocks said to the photographer, pointing to the bloodless gashes in the victim’s skull.

  The flash went off. A foghorn sounded as mist thickened.

  “She could have been slashed by a boat propeller,” O’Hagan said, leaning in for a better look herself. “Not uncommon in drownings, especially if she went over the side of a boat and caught the props at the rear. Wasn’t a very big vessel if that was the case, or she’d have been dismembered, chopped into tiny pieces. Propellers from craft like tugboats tend to space the lacerations farther apart.” More photos were snapped—a close-up of the rope around the victim’s neck and the ropes binding the tarp.

  “Or she didn’t go overboard but resurfaced after a period of submergence due to gas production,” O’Hagan said. “And then she was chopped by the prop of a passing boat. When that kind of refloat occurs, in most instances, the body comes up in a facedown attitude, like this one, and the damage will nearly always be to the back of the head, shoulders, neck, buttocks. Okay, let’s get her out.”

  “Some more hands on deck here, please,” Maddocks said. The coroner’s guys laid the body bag out on the dock and helped heft the floater out. They placed her gently on the body bag. Water pooled around her. The rope around her neck stretched about three meters long and was frayed at the end, blackened by what looked like engine grease.

  More photos were taken. They rolled her over.

  “Holy fuck,” Leo said, taking a sharp step backward.

  They stared.

  A skull that was barely covered with a layer of raw, ragged flesh grimaced up at them. Eyeballs, opaque, protruded from hollow sockets. All the tissue around them was gone. Eaten. Nose gone. Holes in the cheeks. No lips at all softened the bare grin of her jaw.

  “Jeezus fuck, I hate floaters,” Leo whispered.

  “Anthropophagy,” O’Hagan said quietly, still on her haunches, studying the face closely. “The ingesting of a human body by any multicelled organism—fish, reptiles, crustaceans, animals, invertebrates—is a natural phenomenon, but it can be truly shocking to a novice diver to recover something like this.”

  A small creature slithered out of the mouth.

  “Fuck,” said Leo.

  “How long to do that kind of damage?” Maddocks said. “Any idea how long she’s been down there?”

  “Depends on several factors—like where she went in, from where she drifted, temperatures, currents, and what kind of sea life got at her. Sea lice are voracious feeders, for example. They’ll enter the body through any orifice—anus, mouth, ears, nos
e, open wounds—like those on her skull—or they’ll go for the soft tissue, force their way in around an eyeball, eat eyelids, lips, ears, nose. Once inside the body they continue to feed until the source of nourishment is consumed, or until they’re disturbed. Shrimp could have done this within sixteen hours, can reduce a body to a near skeleton within a week. I’ll need to get her onto my table for a better idea. And more context would help.”

  From the ravaged face, there was no immediate way to tell if this DB was male or female, but through the plastic Maddocks could make out the swell of a bare breast, dark nipple. He swiped rain from his wet brow with the back of his sleeve.

  “Doesn’t look like too much damage under the tarp yet,” he said.

  “Clothing usually serves as a barrier for at least the first twenty-four hours,” O’Hagan replied. “Her torso appears to have been pretty well insulated by that polyethylene. It’s tightly secured around the neck. I’m guessing she hasn’t been in the water that long.”

  “Why wrap her body up like that but leave the head exposed?” Maddocks said, more to himself than anyone else as he touched the plastic with his gloved fingertips, trying to better see what was under it.

  O’Hagan shone a small Maglite into the exposed jaw. “Extensive cosmetic work—all her teeth have been veneered, some bridgework immediately apparent,” she said. “She’s not in rigor. I’ll need to cut away some of the tarp or make a hole to get an internal temp.”

  “This tarp, those ropes, what’s inside—it’s all crime scene. I’d prefer not to tamper with anything until we get her into the morgue,” Maddocks said.

  O’Hagan pursed her lips, considering her options. Leo continued to watch in heavy silence. Thick rain beat down on them.

  “Can we get another close-up of the end of this neck rope here?” Maddocks indicated to the photographer. “Looks like it could have gotten caught up in a propeller or something. Maybe she was dragged into the inner harbor before the rope frayed and severed, then the currents and tide did the rest of the work.”

  “She could have gone into the water anywhere in that case, come from anywhere,” Leo said. “If she refloated, then got caught up in a vessel …”

  “Okay,” O’Hagan said, closing her bag. “Establishing postmortem interval is going to be a bugger any way you look at it, without knowing more.”

  “Right, guys, let’s take her in.” Maddocks came to his feet. The body guys zipped the bag up around the tarp cocoon and the ragged skull, and then they lifted their DB into the stainless steel litter basket. They carried her down the dock to where a gurney waited on the bank.

  “See you guys at the morgue when I open her up, then,” O’Hagan said, pushing herself up onto her feet. She followed the body, her bag in hand.

  Leo watched them go, hands still in his pockets. “Got your first day on the job cut out for you, eh, boss man?”

  Maddocks glanced down at him. Those cool blue eyes looked up, met his, and Maddocks had a niggling feeling that he could go down as a scapegoat in this department if they failed to close this case, and soon, given the mayor’s posturing. Maybe it was the reason Buziak wanted the new investigator as lead on the case from the get-go. He was being positioned as the potential fall guy.

  “Get a full recovery report from the dive team, Leo,” he said coolly. “Everything the diver saw down there. Opinions are of value, too, but they should be attached and noted as such.” He snapped off his gloves, and a burn of pain along his wrists reminded him suddenly of the raw ligature marks from his sexcapade at the Foxy, how a mysterious redhead named Angie had cuffed him and fucked him. He’d not been able to get her out of his mind, to the point he’d called her number first thing this morning before going to meet Ginny. No answer. He’d left a message and was probably an asshole for doing so. He wasn’t even sure why he’d gone to the club in the first place. Again, a shrink would have a field day with that. Didn’t matter now. Leo was on the money. He had his days—and nights—cut out for him for a while. He shoved her out of his mind and began to move swiftly along the dock.

  “I tell ya, I really hate floaters,” said Leo, clumping along the dock after him. “One time we called in a family to make an ID on a DB that had been covered in clouds of the sea lice. Some of the bugs slithered out of an orifice right there on the table. I tell ya … gotta plug up those orifices in cases like that before calling in family. Mother fainted right there, on the spot. Cracked her head on the morgue floor. God, I hate floaters.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Angie watched the woman in the ICU room through the glass. She sat hunched forward, holding her child’s hand, her back to the door, dark wavy hair pulled up in a tangled ponytail.

  Angie’s thoughts turned to her own mom, to the burdens all mothers faced in keeping their daughters safe, how her mother had spent a lifetime caring for her. Guilt rushed hot into her chest. She should be with her mom now—looking after her, the tables turned. Again, Angie felt the hollow sensation of time lost, of years swept away under a bridge. The image of the Mother Mary statue shimmered into her brain. A Madonna supposedly untainted by sex, pure in body, yet fertile with child—the farce of it all. It angered her—these mixed messages that society dumped on females, the notion that sex, the act of propagation, the enjoyment of intercourse, was somehow foul, came from the gutter. Filthy girl. Dirty books. A flash of red filled her brain. Blood—she tasted it suddenly in her mouth, felt it hot and sticky upon her face. Pain seared through her lip. And suddenly the little girl in the pink dress was standing in the ICU room beside the mother. Angie’s heart started to stammer. The girl slowly turned her head and looked directly at Angie, but she had no face. Just a luminous white blur framed by long, dark-red hair. The child reached her hand out to Angie, and those words whispered through her brain …

  Come playum dum grove … Come down dem …

  The hallucination vanished. Fear was ice in Angie’s chest. She took a second to gather herself before sliding open the door and stepping into the room. The hissing and beeping sounds of the machines greeted her.

  “Can you hear me, honey?” the woman was saying. “Please, squeeze my hand if you can hear me, Gracie. Please.”

  Angie came up to her side, cleared her throat. “Mrs. Drummond, I’m Detective Angie Pallorino from Metro PD.”

  The woman glanced up, white-faced and hollow-eyed with shock and grief. It was a look Angie knew all too well in her job. The horror, the disbelief, degradation, powerlessness that could hit when violent crime intersected with everyday life, and suddenly an ordinary person going about an ordinary life had to face cops, doctors, coroners, questions, media scrutiny, criminal lawyers, people they never thought they’d have to deal with in their lifetimes.

  “I … I didn’t know that she wasn’t at work last night until I saw the news this morning. I … went into her room, just to be certain that she … she was there. How could this have happened? How could I not have known?”

  Compassion washed through Angie. On the back of it came a raw, furious burn to nail this repeat offender who she believed had slipped through her and Hash’s hands. If they’d gotten him three, four years ago, this woman, this child, might not be in this hospital room.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “The doctor told me what that monster did to … to my baby …” Emotion choked off her words, glistened in her eyes.

  “The nurses told me that your daughter’s name is Grace.”

  The woman’s shaking hand went to her mouth. “My Gracie—we call her Gracie,” she said, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Gracie Marie Drummond. She’s sixteen. She’s turning …” A sob racked her body.

  “It’s okay.” Angie tentatively placed her hand on the woman’s shoulder.

  But the mother soldiered on. “Seventeen. She’s turning seventeen on December twenty-ninth. When she first started to work at the Badger, I had to write her a letter of consent so that she could get that job at the bakery. She … wanted the money. I mean
, we are just getting by. I should never have let her do it, at night, catch the bus by herself. But the city is so safe, and the bus stops right outside our apartment around six in the evening. That’s not so late, and she’s safe inside the bakery until five the next morning, after which she catches the bus home, and a mother wants her daughter to have nice things, you know? I can’t buy nice things for her, let alone myself. I thought it was okay, and it was, for over a year …” Her hand pressed down hard over her mouth, as if to keep it all in, stop herself from collapsing completely.

  “Can I get you a coffee, Mrs. Drummond?” Angie said. “Some water?”

  Lorna Drummond shook her head.

  “I need to ask you some questions, Mrs. Drummond. There’s an alcove down the hall we can use. It’s probably better if we speak there.”

  “I don’t want to be too far from Gracie. She’s been in here all alone.”

  “We’ll be right across the hallway. You can see the door from there.”

  The mother got up and exited the room woodenly. Angie escorted her to a group of chairs beneath a window, helped her sit. Seating herself opposite the woman, Angie took out her notebook. “Can you tell me when you last saw Gracie, Mrs. Drummond?”

  Lorna Drummond pushed tangled strands of hair off her brow. “It was Friday morning. Before I went to work. I work a twenty-four-hour shift at a nursing home downtown. I start at four on Friday afternoons and end at four on Saturdays.” She worried her lip. “So I usually see Gracie before she leaves for her shift at the Blue Badger on Saturday evening, but I … I had a date last night—I’ve just started seeing someone—and I got home in the early hours of Sunday morning, went straight to bed. I woke later than usual this morning, then I … I heard the news. I went to check on Gracie. She wasn’t in her room. Her bed was still made. I … you must think I’m a terrible mother. I shouldn’t have gone on that date. But I was finally feeling like I was getting my life back.” She fumbled in her pocket for a Kleenex, and she blew her nose hard. It was red. Swollen. Her eyes puffy. “You think you have all the time in the world, and then … then you wish you’d …” Her words were swallowed as her body heaved with a racking sob.